OverviewThe System Preparation Tool (Sysprep) prepares a Windows installation for duplication, also called imaging, and allows you to capture a custom Windows image that can be reused in an entire organization. This can be particularly useful when provisioning machines for a team of BizTalk developers. Installing and configuring BizTalk Server machines from scratch increases the time to complete a project. The other main benefit is ensuring that every developer is working on a consistent configuration, reducing the risk of “this works on my machine” incidents. However, systematically preparing a BizTalk Server image is not as simple as systematically preparing a base operating system image; primarily due to BizTalk Server's dependency on SQL Server. BizTalk Server comes with a few sample Sysprep scripts, but as with most of the samples, these are just a base and require some customizations and additions. The documentation that accompanies the sample scripts is misleading in places and contains gaps that can be confusing. In this article, I will cover the steps required to Sysprep a fully configured BizTalk Server virtual machine. Golden Image The “golden image” is an isolated virtual machine. configured with: • Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition • SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition • BizTalk Server 2010 Enterprise Edition ○ Enterprise SSO ○ BizTalk Runtime ○ Business Rules Engine ○ BAM Tools § BAM Alerts ○ BAM Portal • BizTalk Server 2010 ESB Toolkit ○ Exception Management ○ ESB Core Components • Visual Studio 2010 Premium EditionStepsInstall and configure the software listed above using local accounts and groups.PrerequisitesA number of changes must be made after configuration and before setting up Sysprep to also reduce the changes required during Sysprep. than the complexity of the scripts. These are: •